ALEXANDRIA, THE INTELLECTUAL METROPOLIS OF THE WORLD.--A PRODIGIOUS STIMULUS GIVEN TO LEARNING.--THE SEPTUAGINT.--DEVELOPMENT OF GRECIAN PHILOSOPHY INTO ARISTOTLIANISM.--THIS ENGRAFTED ON JEWISH THEOLOGY.--OPPOSITION OF CHRISTIANITY TO ARISTOTLIANISM.--AVERROES.--MOSES MAIMONIDES.--OPPOSITION UNSUCCESSFUL. We must devote some little space and time to a review of the place the Moors and the Jews held in philosophy during their stay in Spain from the eighth to the fifteenth century. The purpose of this work makes this review necessary. Not that we shall see any wonderful advance in this department of learning, nor that we need show the glaring contrast between the sophistical cobwebs of the cotemporaneous scholastics and the rational researches of the Moorish and Jewish philosophers, but that we may see what a debt of gratitude modern philosophy owes the Jew and Moor, for taking up the thread of philosophical research where Greek intelligence had been forced to leave it, and for carrying it forward sufficiently for modern philosophy to build upon it, as a superstructure, the theories and systems of to-day. To fully understand their place in philosophy it is necessary for us to retrace our steps in history some 2,000 years, and enter the city of Alexandria. Here Alexander the Great had established his seat of government. It became the intellectual metropolis of the world. Thither the conqueror brought the wealth and learning of the globe. Into that city the people streamed, or were brought as prisoners, from the remotest corners of the known world, from the Danube to the Nile, and from the Nile to the Ganges. For the first time in the world's history, there could be found in one city, men who could speak learnedly of the Borean blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, and of the simoons of the Oriental deserts, of pyramids and obelisks and sphinxes and hieroglyphics, of the Persian and Assyrian and Babylonian wonders, of the Chaldean astronomers, of hanging gardens, aqueducts, hydraulic machinery, tunnels under the river-bed, or of the Assyrian method of printing, on plastic clay. For the first time in the world's history seekers after knowledge could listen, in the Serapion of Alexandria, to learned discussions between Jewish monotheists and Persian dualists and Grecian polytheists and Egyptian mysticists and Indian Brahmanists and Buddhists, and between the Ionics and Pythagoreans, and Eleatics and the Atomists and Anaxagoreans, and the Socratists, and Platonists and Aristotelians and Stoics and Epicureans and Neo-Platonists. No age or city had ever furnished better opportunities for intellectual pursuits. No city could ever before this, point to kings more enthusiastic for the promotion of learning than were her Ptolemys, nor could all antiquity boast of a library equal to hers, or of a museum as justly celebrated for its botanical gardens and astronomical observatories and anatomical college and chemical laboratory.